Three generations. One counter. And an ice cream formula that exists only in the memory of the man who makes it.

The Memory

A Scene That Transcends Time

Your father pulls into the angled parking spot at Sip ‘n Soda on  Hampton Road and cuts the engine. It’s August, 1987. Or perhaps 1997. Maybe even 2007. The year doesn’t matter because nothing here has changed.

Notice how the sign remains identical to your first visit. Similarly, the screen door still creaks the same way. Furthermore, the blast of air conditioning when you walk in—that specific temperature, that specific smell of coffee and griddle grease and something sweet underneath—is exactly what it was the first time you came here, back when you were small enough to need a boost onto the counter stool.

The Ritual of Ordering

Before you even sit down, you already know what you’re going to order. In fact, you’ve known since the car turned off Montauk Highway. A lime rickey—the drink your grandfather ordered. Additionally, it’s the drink your father orders. Moreover, it’s the drink you’ll order for your own kids someday, if you’re lucky enough to have kids, if you’re lucky enough to bring them here, if Sip ‘n Soda still stands when they’re old enough to remember.

The man behind the counter doesn’t ask what you want. Instead, he remembers. He’s been remembering for thirty years.

Savoring the Moment

The lime rickey arrives. Tart and cold and perfect. You drink it the way your grandfather taught you—slowly, making it last, because some things shouldn’t be rushed.

Outside, the Hamptons happens. Traffic crawls, money flows, and the endless performance of summer continues. In here, however, a ceiling fan turns lazily. Meanwhile, a cash register that still has buttons instead of a touchscreen rings up a grilled cheese. At the same time, a family you’ve never met sits in the booth behind you, and their kid gets ice cream on his shirt, and his mother pretends to be mad but isn’t.

This is what it feels like to be somewhere instead of nowhere.

The Truth

The Art of Not Trying

Sip ‘n Soda isn’t trying to be anything. Surprisingly, this is harder than it sounds.

Every other restaurant in the Hamptons is trying. Specifically, they’re trying to be the next hot spot, trying to be timeless, trying to be exclusive, trying to be approachable, trying to be farm-to-table, trying to be “elevated casual,” trying to be something that marketers can describe in a press release and photographers can capture for a magazine.

A Family Legacy Since 1958

Sip ‘n Soda opened in 1958. The Parash family—William, Nicoletta, Paul, and Jim—built it with their hands and have run it ever since. Currently, they’re on the third generation. Mark Parash, Paul’s son, took over in 1992 and became full owner in 2019.

When you ask Mark what the secret is, he doesn’t talk about branding or positioning or market differentiation. Instead, he talks about showing up. Every day. For decades. He makes the same ice cream, the same lime rickey, the same egg sandwich, the same way, because that’s what the people who come here expect, and those people are the reason the doors stay open.

What Bourdain Would Have Recognized

Bourdain would have loved this place. Not because the food achieves transcendence—it’s a luncheonette, and the food is exactly what luncheonette food should be—but because it’s honest. There’s no gap between what Sip ‘n Soda claims to be and what it actually is. No narrative. No mythology crafted by a PR firm. Just a family, a counter, and sixty-seven years of muscle memory.

“I was born with a spatula in one hand and an ice cream scoop in the other,” Mark told an interviewer a few years ago. He wasn’t being cute. Rather, he was being literal. This is what inheritance looks like when it isn’t measured in dollars.

The History

A Century of Luncheonettes

The Parash family has been in the luncheonette business for over a century. Let that sink in. For more than a hundred years, they’ve been flipping eggs, scooping ice cream, and listening to people talk about their days.

William Parash opened the original Candy Kitchen in Oyster Bay in 1918. Subsequently, in 1925, he and his wife Nicoletta opened the Bridgehampton Candy Kitchen—the same one that still operates today, a few miles east on Montauk Highway. They lived above the restaurant. Their sons, Jim and Paul, were born there. As a result, the apartment above a luncheonette became their first home on earth.

The Southampton Chapter Begins

The family eventually settled in Mattituck, where they ran the Paradise Sweet Shop. Then, in 1958, William and Nicoletta’s sons opened Sip ‘n Soda in Southampton. Paul and Jim ran it together after their parents passed, and they were later joined by Paul’s son Mark in 1992. When Paul died in 2008, Mark became partners with his Uncle Jim. Finally, when Jim retired in 2019, Mark became sole owner.

This isn’t merely a business. This is a bloodline.

Witnesses to History

Think about what that means. Consider the conversations that have happened at that counter. The dates, the breakups, the job offers, the bad news, the good news, the ordinary Tuesday mornings when nothing happened except someone had a cup of coffee and felt a little less alone. Three generations of Parash men have witnessed all of it, served as the backdrop to all of it, and provided the coffee and the ice cream and the quiet, reliable presence that makes a place feel like a place.

A Living Museum

The luncheonette itself looks like a museum exhibit, except everything works and everything’s for sale. Specifically, the counter stools, the booths, the soda fountain, and the menu board—it’s all original, or close enough that the distinction doesn’t matter. Additionally, there are Irwin Hasen posters on the walls, custom drawings featuring pop culture icons drinking Sip ‘n Soda’s famous lime rickey. Hasen, for those who don’t know, created the comic strip “Dondi.” He started making these posters sometime in the 1970s, and they’re still here, a little faded, a little curled at the edges, perfect.

The Secret

An Unwritten Formula

The ice cream at Sip ‘n Soda comes from a recipe that has never been written down.

Read that again. Never written down.

Each generation of the Parash family has had to memorize the recipe. It passes down orally, like a folk song, like a family prayer. When Mark took over, he committed it to memory. He can’t show it to you. He can’t email it to you. It exists only in his head and in the taste of the ice cream itself.

Forty Flavors of Excellence

There are over forty flavors, some seasonal, some permanent. Black raspberry chip. Peach. Lemon custard. Nutella. Cantaloupe, which they make once a season. Meanwhile, the classics—coffee chip, Oreo—remain always available.

“After many years of making ice cream I’ve learned to balance texture and flavor,” Mark said. That’s the only explanation you’re going to get. Balance. Texture. Flavor. And a recipe that will die if the last person who knows it dies without passing it on.

Sacred Knowledge in a Digital Age

This approach seems insane. Yet it’s also beautiful. In an age when every recipe is a Google search away, when “secret family formulas” are usually marketing gimmicks, the Parash family has maintained an actual secret for over sixty years. Not because it’s good business—it’s probably terrible business, a single point of failure, a succession risk that would make any consultant break out in hives—but because some things are sacred. Some things are family. Some things don’t belong to the world.

Bourdain understood this principle deeply. He spent his career chasing recipes, techniques, traditions—but he also knew that the best stuff couldn’t be extracted, bottled, or franchised. The best stuff lived in the hands and the memories of the people who made it. You couldn’t steal it. You could only experience it, in that place, made by those hands, and be grateful.

The Sociology

The Concept of Third Places

Sip ‘n Soda functions as what sociologists call a “third place”—somewhere that isn’t home and isn’t work, a neutral ground where community happens.

Ray Oldenburg coined the term, arguing that third places are essential to civil society and democratic engagement. These are spaces where people from different backgrounds mix, where conversations happen across class lines, where the social fabric gets woven and re-woven every day.

A Rare Democratic Space

The Hamptons has very few genuine third places left. Most spaces sort by money—either you can afford to be here, or you can’t. The $400 dinner doesn’t mingle with the kitchen staff. The private beach doesn’t host the landscapers. Everything is stratified, segmented, and priced accordingly.

However, Sip ‘n Soda, like Candy Kitchen, operates outside that logic. The counter doesn’t care what you’re worth. The lime rickey costs the same whether you arrive in a Tesla or a pickup truck. The booths seat whoever sits down first.

The People Who Make It Matter

Mark Parash told an interviewer that the best part of his job is “the people.” Not specific people. Not VIPs. Just people. The regulars who’ve been coming for decades, the tourists passing through, the summer kids who’ll grow up and bring their own kids. The business relationships that become friendships over years of small talk and coffee refills.

Pierre Bourdieu would note that this apparent classlessness is itself a form of distinction. The wealthy person who eats at Sip ‘n Soda instead of some Scene Restaurant makes a statement—performing a rejection of status that is, paradoxically, a status move. “I don’t need to prove anything. I can eat at the luncheonette.”

Beyond Deconstruction

Fine. That’s probably true. The Hamptons is a complicated place, and nothing here is ever as simple as it looks.

But here’s what’s also true: a seventy-year-old widow comes in every morning for coffee and a conversation with whoever’s behind the counter. A contractor stops in for breakfast before a job, sitting in the same booth he’s occupied for fifteen years. A kid orders his first egg cream and makes a face because he’s never tasted anything like it, and his grandmother laughs, and for a moment everyone in earshot connects through that laugh.

You can deconstruct this. You can analyze the power dynamics and the symbolic capital and the performance of authenticity. Alternatively, you can just drink your lime rickey and be glad this place exists.

Bourdain would tell you to do the latter.

The Uncomfortable Part

Confronting What’s Being Lost

The thing about places like Sip ‘n Soda is that they make you confront what’s being lost.

Southampton Village has changed almost beyond recognition. The storefronts that used to house hardware stores and five-and-dimes now hold boutiques selling $800 sandals. The families that built these communities—the fishing families, the farming families, the families that ran the luncheonettes and the repair shops and the modest little businesses that made a town a town—most of them are gone. They’ve been priced out, pushed west, replaced by seasonal wealth that arrives in May and vanishes in September.

Why Sip ‘n Soda Survives

Sip ‘n Soda is a survivor. But survival isn’t victory. Walk around Southampton today and count the places that feel like they belong to the people who live here year-round. The list is short and getting shorter.

The Parash family has held on because they own the building—that matters, and that’s the only reason they’re still here. If they paid market rent, this conversation would be hypothetical. A “coming soon” sign would hang in the window along with a press release about an “exciting new concept.”

The Cost of Authenticity

This is the part we don’t like to talk about when we celebrate “authentic” places. Authenticity, in the Hamptons context, usually serves as a synonym for “hasn’t been killed yet.” The places we romanticize are often the last holdouts of a community that’s been systematically dismantled by the very people who now show up to Instagram the egg creams.

Bourdain never let his audiences off the hook for this reality. He’d take you to some perfect little family restaurant, show you the beauty and the craft and the love that went into it, and then make you sit with the fact that places like this were disappearing, and that the forces of money and tourism and “development” were responsible, and that by being there, by being a tourist yourself, you were part of the problem.

A Quiet Defiance

The Parash family has been serving Southampton for sixty-seven years. They’ve watched the town change around them—the old families leave, the new money arrive, the character drain out of Main Street one storefront at a time. The Parash family stayed anyway. Kept the prices low, the menu simple, the door open.

That’s not just business. That’s a kind of defiance.

What to Order

The Lime Rickey

Start with the lime rickey. This is non-negotiable. Sip ‘n Soda has been famous for lime rickeys since before most people reading this were born. It’s tart, it’s cold, and it’s refreshing in a way that no craft cocktail or artisanal soda can replicate. Order it once, and you’ll understand why three generations of families have been ordering it.

The Ice Cream

Next, try the ice cream. Pick a flavor, any flavor. The staff makes it in-house from the secret recipe that exists only in Mark Parash’s memory. The lemon custard is extraordinary. The peach, when it’s in season, is the taste of August in a cup. Get a milkshake if you want, but get a scoop straight at least once—you need to taste the ice cream unmediated.

Breakfast and Beyond

For breakfast, order the egg sandwich. Eggs, cheese, meat if you want it, on a roll or toast. Simple. Correct. It’s the kind of breakfast that fuels a morning’s work, which is what breakfast is supposed to do.

Alternatively, try the burger. Luncheonette burger. No gastropub pretension, no smash technique, no ‘signature blend’ mythology. Beef. Griddle. Fixings. If you need more than that from a burger, too many food blogs have ruined you.

What It Costs

Affordable by Design

Nothing. By Hamptons standards, nothing.

You can walk into Sip ‘n Soda, sit at the counter, order a lime rickey and a burger, get a scoop of ice cream for dessert, leave a proper tip, and walk out having spent less than a single cocktail at most Southampton restaurants.

A Moral Position Disguised as a Business Model

This pricing represents a moral position disguised as a business model. The Parash family could charge more. The tourists would pay it. The summer people would barely notice. Nevertheless, they don’t charge more, because Sip ‘n Soda has always been for everyone, and “everyone” includes people who can’t afford $22 for a grilled cheese.

In the Hamptons, underpricing is a radical act.

The Point

A Time Machine

There’s a moment in Mad Men when Don Draper pitches the Kodak Carousel. He doesn’t talk about the technology. Instead, he talks about memory. He talks about the pain of looking at photographs of your children when they were young, your wife when you were still in love, a past that’s gone and can never come back. “This device isn’t a spaceship,” he says. “It’s a time machine.”

Sip ‘n Soda is a time machine.

The Destination Must Still Exist

But here’s the thing about time machines: they only work if the destination still exists. You can be nostalgic for a luncheonette, but if the luncheonette is gone, the nostalgia is just grief with better lighting. The ache becomes abstract. The memory has nowhere to land.

The Parash family has kept the destination open. For sixty-seven years, they’ve maintained the place where the memory lives. They’ve resisted the pressure to sell, to change, to “update” or “elevate” or “reimagine.” They’ve kept the counter, the stools, the lime rickey, the secret recipe. Consequently, they’ve made it possible for you to bring your daughter to the same place your grandmother brought you, and order the same drink, and feel the same thing.

That’s not sentimentality. That’s a gift.

You Can Taste When Someone Gives a Damn

Bourdain once said that the best meals of his life weren’t in Michelin-starred restaurants. Rather, they were in places like this—family-run, unpretentious, stubborn in their commitment to doing one thing well. He said you could taste the love in the food. Dead serious. Meant it literally. You can taste whether someone gives a damn.

The ice cream at Sip ‘n Soda tastes like someone gives a damn. The lime rickey tastes like three generations of giving a damn. The whole place—the worn booths, the old posters, the cash register with actual buttons—feels like what giving a damn looks like when it’s sustained across decades.

Why Some Things Stay Sacred

The secret recipe has never been written down because writing it down would make it a formula. It would make it transferable, sellable, franchisable. It would make it content. However, some things shouldn’t be content. Some things should stay in the family.

Walk in. Sit at the counter. Order a lime rickey. Let it be cold and tart and exactly what you remembered.

Some recipes can’t be written down. Not every inheritance can be taxed. Certain places just have to be experienced, in person, while they still exist.

The door is open. The family is still here. The secret is safe.

For now.

Visit Sip ‘n Soda

Sip ‘n Soda

40 Hampton Road, Southampton

(631) 283-9752

Open Wednesday–Monday, 7:30am–4:30pm (Closed Tuesdays)

Cash only. No reservations, Wi-Fi, or pretense.